A new year calls for a new layout change... behold!
Hopes and Dreams UNDERTALE
夢と希望／「UNDERTALE」より
| Game | Genre |  |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NS PS4 AC0 Asia Green 2.0 |  | ★3 (126/164) | ★5 (223/294) | ★6 (438/452) | ★8 (694/597) | - |
| AC Nijiiro |  |
170.68-176.67
udtymt (Undertale + Yume to Kibou)There's no better time than a year's beginning to unleash a better outlook forecast in all things to come; in order to better reflect that sentiment, here's a song feature that bears the same... while framed in a different context! Hopes and Dreams is one of the three songs that came to Taiko as part of the console-rooted collaboration with the kickstarted indie hit game UNDERTALE, as well as one of the two to make it to the ongoing arcade frontier as a Nijiiro Version launch track.
The song was (somehow) introduced with the game's release-date reveal video on YouTube, being shadow-namedropped while the derivative track Final Power -a reversed version to Hopes and Dreams- is played on screen. Like the infamous MEGALOVANIA, this song is exclusive to the final-boss gameplay portion related to one of the source games' extreme-sides morality paths: while the Sans boss theme has been the Taiko-approved representative of a murderous path's end -achieved by exhausting every enemy spawn zone and every major encounter by killing enemies-, Hopes and Dreams lays at the opposite end, by playing the game so that no one is killed and every major enemy encounter ends by sparing the opponent, alongside completing one side-quest line. The first track played in the final battle against Asriel Dreemur as well as the 87th-listed track in UNDERTALE's official soundtrack, Hopes and Dreams draws from several leitmotifs adopted in the rest of the game's overall score and it allegedly was one of the two tracks that "took the most effort to make" from its composer Toby Fox, alongside the title-dropper Undertale. The Japanese version of the game flips the order of the two major words in the song title' JP wording, which in turn is also referenced by its ID in Taiko gaming (Undertale Yume to Kibō).
On the difficulty-talk side, there's no much going for the 'pacifist route' final boss track, with a mixture of high-note density and multiple note pattern repetitions like many other songs in the genre (mainly Idolm@ster tracks) before it; what's truly peculiar about it lies on its forked-path play, extended to all of the song's modes and played out a-la Soroban 2000 in quite the egregious bit of fanservice towards the source game. Calling back to such pacifist route's access criteria, by not hitting any note up until the 53rd stanza's beginning, the chart will lock itself to the Advanced route and will display a succession of 7-note clusters, bearing a hidden message that is being delivered as 7-bit-coded English words in ASCII, with Don notes as '0's and Kat notes as '1's. Each of the four modes bears a different message which, when translated, hands out one of the narration messages that appear during the UNDERTALE pacifist route's final fight right before launching an attack to the final adversary, a sentiment which is partially replicated with the quickly-scrolling small drumrolls at the end of each of the four modes. Below are the translations of the four messages:
Kantan: But it refused.
Futsuu: You held on to your hopes...
Muzukashii: You think about why you're here now...
Oni: Through DETERMINATION, the dream become true.
